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Photographing the Refugee Trail by Drone

Photographing the Refugee Trail by Drone

Credit Rocco Rorandelli

Photographing the Refugee Trail by Drone

By James EstrinDec. 10, 2015Dec. 10, 2015

Immigration is a deeply personal matter for Rocco Rorandelli: He was born in Florence to a mother from the Bronx and a father from Italy, married an Indian woman and now lives in Rome raising twin boys who are part American. Yet when it came time to photograph the current refugee crisis in Europe, he took a decidedly impersonal approach: Rather than be wedged in among desperate migrants, he used a drone hovering over them.

“It’s a less personal story that I’m telling from the air,” he said. “I’m looking from afar, which is somewhat against classic photojournalism where we are supposed to be close and intimate. This is more like mapping.”

His decision did not signal a lessening of his feelings about immigration, a subject he has photographed for the last seven years. But he relied on a more distant perspective to emphasize that not only is migration for better opportunities a human phenomenon dating back millenniums, but also one we share with many other species.

He came to that conclusion earlier this year when he set off to document the hundreds of thousands of migrants traveling to Germany from Greece. Amid all the other coverage, he was unsure whether it was worthwhile for him to make similar images.

“I realized there were no need for such photos in the sense that there’s already a huge archive of images of Syrian and other refugees by thousands of photographers coming from all these countries,” Mr. Rorandelli, 42, said. “I wanted to follow the trail, but at the same time I wanted to try to give a different view.”

His photos are reminiscent of aerial images of the migrations of herds. Looking at them, you get a sense of the migrants’ long and arduous journey of hundreds of miles, almost all on foot. At the same time, if you look very closely at the details, the images become even more powerful when you recognize individual acts and gestures, like a man pulling someone out of the mud (Slide 8).

Mr. Rorandelli, who is a founding member of the Italian photo collective Terra Project, has a Ph.D. in biology from the University of Florence. His science background, he said, led him to use drone technology to map migration.

“There’s a lot of debate if Europe should accept these refugees and in what way, but at the same time I thought it would be nice to make people think about it as a natural phenomenon that is part of our history as humans,” he said. “For me, this movement makes the world a smaller, friendlier place.”